The article, in a publication whose daily readership and established reputation dwarfs even the best read nuclear focused blogs, informs readers that evacuating the area near the Fukushima nuclear plants and forcing people to remain away from their property for more than four years has caused immeasurably more harm than simply allowing the people to remain in place and letting the radioactive materials naturally disperse and decay.

As Johnson wrote:

But about 1,600 people died from the stress of the evacuation — one that some scientists believe was not justified by the relatively moderate radiation levels at the Japanese nuclear plant. … Had the evacuees stayed home, their cumulative exposure over four years, in the most intensely radioactive locations, would have been about 70 millisieverts — roughly comparable to receiving a high-resolution whole-body diagnostic scan each year. But those hot spots were anomalies.

By Dr. Doss’s calculations, most residents would have received much less, about 4 millisieverts a year. The average annual exposure from the natural background radiation of the earth is 2.4 millisieverts.

Johnson might also have included the fact that the variations in human exposures from natural radiation and medical diagnostic procedures range from a low of about 1 mSv per year to a high of approximately 250 mSv per year. Even the people who received doses on the high end of the estimate would have been well within the existing variations in dose. There is little, if any, evidence pointing to excess negative health effects due to variations in existing radiation doses.

The reason the computed doses are so low is that there was not much radioactive material released. The small amount that escaped was distributed over a large area, with much of it being washed out to sea. The most active and hazardous materials are also the ones that disappear the fastest.

Dilution might not be the solution to routine pollution, but it is the generally accepted, effective solution to the unplanned release of hazardous gases or fine particles.

Unfortunately, decision makers have been taught to believe that radioactive material is especially hazardous and that even the smallest measurable amounts need to be avoided if at all possible. They have been repeatedly told by loud voices that there is no safe dose of radiation. The organizations that have been established as the protectors of public health with regard to radiation have focused on establishing regulations that require their licensees to control radiation doses to levels that are as low as reasonably achievable.

The agencies that have the legislated responsibility for being experts on radiation have not invested enough effort helping agencies charged with other aspects of public safety to recognize the difference between dose standards established to raise the performance bar for radioactive material licensees and radiation doses that are high enough to detectably harm human health. There are at least two orders of magnitude of difference between the two.

Most radiation protection specialists know that current standards are far lower needed to protect health and willingly expose themselves to much higher doses. They tell each other that establishing and enforcing tighter than needed standards is okay because at least it’s “conservative.”

They ignore the important fact that misunderstanding risks can lead to hazardous decision making. In a crisis situation where panic kills and calm, properly focused efforts lead to the greatest chance for survival and recovery, improper prioritization is far from protective.

Crisis decision making has been one of my focus areas for many years. I’ve spend a good portion of my life learning to evaluate hazards and protect people from harm, starting with the Red Cross senior lifesaving course that I took in 1975 in preparation for working as a lifeguard.

As a submarine junior officer, I was trained to be a first responder and leader of casualty assistant teams. My mentors emphasized the importance of promptly evaluating risks and prioritizing actions based on reducing the most immediately hazardous items as rapidly as possible before later addressing less pressing items. Only after taking care of top priorities would we move to items that were merely annoyances needing to be cleaned up.

Because I was a first responder in a nuclear powered ship, my training included an emphasis on understanding when radiation was hazardous to health, when it was a concern to be managed, and when it could be ignored. It’s probably worth noting here that I was transferred out of my first responder role — after nine years of heavily reinforced training and practice — in December 1990.

As I worked my way into positions of increasing responsibility, I learned to coordinate multiple teams of first responders, to write procedures that could be studied in advance, and to prepare quick reference material that could be consulted in emergencies in order to help people in pressure situations take the right paths. Getting the guidance right was vital to producing correct, timely decisions.

The importance of good guidance is not limited to the information provided to people on the scene; higher level leaders are often not specialists and “crisis mode” does not provide time for extensive research.

Articles like Johnson’s need to be repeated and promoted. The people charged with regulating “use of radioactive materials to protect public health and safety, promote the common defense and security, and protect the environment,” need to clearly separate regulations designed to hold licensees to a high standard and public safety limits that should be established by determining — in advance of any future crisis — how high radiation doses have to be before they have the potential for observable harm to human health.

Atomic Insights is not standing alone in the effort to push people and agencies to take a hard look at the basis for current radiation assumptions and regulations. Please watch Norbert Rempe, a retired professional geologist who spent much of his career performing work associated with the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant, describe some of the costs and dangers associated with treating even the smallest measurable doses of radiation as hazardous.

In terms of safety, some would say that the fire was far more dangerous than the low-level radiation release.

Norbert Rempe, a retired geologist who worked at WIPP for over 20 years attends most WIPP meetings and openly criticizes WIPP officials.

Rempe has several concerns, including that WIPP and DOE officials still haven’t given a good estimate of the actual radiation still present in the underground.

“If you need to clean up a mess, you need to establish the size of the mess,” Rempe said.

Rempe said that what happened during the fire was far more dangerous then the radiation leak.

“These were my former colleagues who were potentially in danger, and it, the fire, could’ve caused a lot more damage then the radiation leak,” Rempe said. “Safety is their number one priority, but improving nuclear safety, for nuclear, trumped everything.”

Rempe explained that when the fire occurred, the ventilation system in the underground was shifted as if it were a radiological event, an act that made smoke inhalation more of an issue during the fire.

During his presentation, Rempe makes a number of important points about the costs associated with trying to enforce radiation protection limits that are a small fraction of the variations in normal background exposure around the world. He identifies an iron quadrangle of interest groups that benefit from excessive spending to clean up places that are already clean enough to prevent hazards to humans. They benefit because they are the recipients of the spending; they are on the revenue side of double entry accounting systems where one entity’s costs become another entity’s revenues.

It’s a lengthy presentation, but the slides are good and the delivery is informative and wryly amusing.

On December 7, 2014, 60 Minutes, the venerable investigative reporting television show that has been on the air since 1968, aired a segment about Duke Energy’s Dan River coal ash spill, which occurred on February 2, 2014. That large release of coal waste was a big topic in local newspapers and television shows in my […]

On December 3, 2014, Dr. Wade Allison was invited to give a speech to the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of Japan. The title of that talk was The Fukushima nuclear accident and the unwarranted fear of low-dose radiation. After Dr. Allison gave his talk explaining why he believed that our current treatment of radiation is governed […]

On November 23, 2014, 60 minutes, the venerable CBS News Sunday evening program that has been on the air since its launch in 1968, aired a segment titled Chernobyl: The Catastrophe That Never Ended. The show is full of fascinating contrasts between what the cameras show to the audience and what the narrator tells the […]

By Les Corrice It is widely reported that hundreds of tons of highly contaminated Fukushima Daiichi groundwater pours into the Pacific Ocean every day. But, an objective look at the evidence tells a completely different story. It’s long-past time for the Tokyo Electric Company (Tepco) and the Nuclear Regulation Authority (NRA) to broadcast the truth […]

Dr. Wade Allison — retired professor of physics and medical physics at Oxford University, author of Radiation and Reason and a founding member of the international SARI group (Scientists for Accurate Radiation Information — has recently published a video titled Why radiation is safe & all nations should embrace nuclear technology – Professor Wade Allison […]

An Atomic Insights reader (thanks Pete51) sent me a link to an amazing documentary that ran at the beginning of May on NHK, a Japanese network that is available now on some US cable systems. It tells the story of six retirees who now work daily to protect and preserve Okuma Town, which is the […]

On most issues, I tend to side with the opinions expressed on Democracy Now. The journalists on that viewer/listener-supported show do real investigative journalism and often question the spin provided by commercial media. When it comes to nuclear energy, however, the show and its host are unreliable and biased. On March 19, 2014, Democracy Now […]

While researching answers to comments made on the Atomic Insights post titled Healthy doses of radiation, I found a book titled Nuclear Shadowboxing: Legacies and Challenges. It includes a fascinating appendix titled Radiation, Pollution and Radiophobia that should be required reading for people who are interested in understanding more about the health effects of low […]

On March 6, 2014, the Department of Energy held a town hall meeting for the residents of Carlsbad, NM to provide an update on the efforts of the WIPP facility to recover from the airborne contamination issue that occurred in the underground facility on February 14. DOE representatives then conducted a brief press conference summarizing […]

The US Department of Energy (DOE) will host a town hall meeting on March 6, 2014 at 5:30 PM (MT) at the Walter Gerrells Performing Arts Center in Carlsbad, NM. Representatives from the DOE headquarters and from the Carlsbad Field Office will provide an information update on recovery activities at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant. […]